Synopsis: Once the exclusive domain of farmers, plant breeding is now nearly always practiced without any meaningful farmer input. The downsides associated with this transition have hardly been explored. They include losses of genetic diversity, local adaptability, plant robustness, flavor, nutritional quality, and many other important crop traits. In particular, commercial seed breeding focuses on the specific needs of chemical agriculture. Commodity crops are thus bred for close spacing and short stature so farmers have to buy more seeds per acre and herbicides to suppress the weeds. GMOs (genetically modified organisms) have extended this trend and are even bred to sell specific herbicides. By abandoning seed saving and animal breeding, farmers have thus surrendered control over the long-term direction of agriculture. Its future is now almost exclusively in the hands of the chemical industry while breeding for organic agriculture is almost nonexistent.

But can breeding be returned to farmer control without sacrificing short-term benefits? Salvatore Ceccarelli is a leading international scientist and proponent of farmer-led participatory and evolutionary plant breeding methods based on solid scientific grounds. He works with diverse crops and here describes how even common commercial varieties can be used as the gene pools from which to successfully create evolutionary populations from which farmers can select high-quality locally-adapted varieties.